We heal by understanding and acceptance, and by our willingness to grow up and grow out. We heal by entering through the gates of experience, not by climbing over them. One of the biggest fallacies we confront during our time here is the belief that healing is a goal. It isn’t. We cannot conjure healing. It is the inevitable and eventual positive consequence of dealing with our struggles as they come and as they are passing into each successive phase of their metamorphosis within us.

Emotional and relational boundaries should never be walls or weapons. They are rudders, governing instruments for us to live life fully and more effectively. In our ability to establish boundaries, we hold a great deal of power. It is our fear of this potential for power that frequently keeps us from wielding it with grace and skill. And it is our simultaneous obsession with this power, that leads us to abuse it, to lord it over others, to build our undefiled and untouchable private kingdoms.

Each of us longs for, and is in fact, built for seeking some notion of home. You could say that we've been looking for it since the moment we emerged naked and crying from our mother's womb, perhaps wishing that we had not left the warmth and protection of her body. Our unconscious longing for home, for what it can be for us, continually changes over the course of our lives.

As a gateway toward change and release, few things can so quickly and effectively access the truth, both the beautiful and ugly, as a good fight. But we spend them aimlessly. The ultimate goal of any argument should be to uncover truth, both about the thing we are debating and perhaps more importantly, about ourselves.

It isn’t wrong to speak from these places of pain. We need to externalize them in healthy ways if we are going to heal and continue to grow up. But we should never gather the ingredients for the advice we give to others from these corners. These regions of our psyche are inherently skewed in their convictions, consistently ill-informed, and almost always fueled by a childish mentality instead of a childlike curiosity.

There is a certain strategic advantage to these times of limitation. A certain leanness of access forces us to increase our intimacy with whatever we’re engaging with.

Innovation and creative problem-solving demand a certain tenacity. And tenacity is never born from excess. It crawls its way up and out of the tunnels of need and unfulfilled dreams toward the surface light of realization. There are certain thoughts and emotions only available to us in the creative upheaval found exclusively in a time of limited resources.

There is a sacredness to vulnerability, an unspoken covenant urging us to not completely screw each other up. We can’t thrash about like a coked-up gorilla riding a bull through a China shop whenever someone invites us in.

Anger, though, is necessary and useful. Without our ability to both access and externalize it, there would be certain experiences, certain failures or rejections, certain losses, disappointments and conflicts, that would have no equivalent emotional outlet, ultimately leaving us impotent and defeated.

Anger is no devil. It is a powerful and essential aspect of our being. And we can do unimaginable harm to ourselves and others when we repress and deny it.

Different landscapes not only cause us to feel different emotions, but to think different thoughts. Every environment has a way of stirring up certain memories, certain theories, different ways to view an idea or concept, and at times, an extra subconscious push toward mental pathways that lead to the knowledge we need to solve certain lingering problems in our life.

Abundance has the potential to lead us into expansion in every area of life, the financial and intellectual, the relational as well as spiritual, as long as it is understood rightly and used wisely. More acutely, temporal abundance should lead us progressively toward an abundant life as a whole.

When we kneel down to embrace our kids, to look them in their eyes at their level, to lie down next to the earth and play, or simply to sit down on the floor to talk, they see once more that their unique perspective holds weight with at least a few adults. They begin to grasp the truth that their place, while physically lower, is neither spiritually nor relationally so.

Idealism that stores the past in bottles is an understandable but damaging affair. It is also a very difficult mindset to free oneself from. There is a glittering highness to it all, a tragic romance in our fight to hold onto something transcendent yet vanishing.

Love reminds us to look for the unseen in others, even when so much has already been revealed. Love will show honor when dishonor and shame seem the most natural course of action. It will caress when others simply want to strike. And it can bring that visceral and elegant growth that is only ignited by one who knows us so well.

Our attempt to grip and control is the unconscious pursuit of what you might call, an attractively presented death, an embalming method. Like killing a rare butterfly and pinning it to a board, in our mad obsession with holding everything so tightly, we drain it of life. It is an obsession with safety, with existence as still life, with the frozen image of a more pleasing existence instead of the reality of a more complex one.

Both regret and nostalgia have value. They have as much worth as any other mechanism that allows us to travel in time psychologically and emotionally. They are both catalysts for this perceptual time travel and altars of remembrance, that is, internal structures established to honor something of significance. And the more we can remember, the more we can learn. Don't forget, though, that altars can either be very good - places of contemplation and gratitude. Or they can be very bad - places where life itself is consumed by fires burned to lesser and darker gods.

The failure of politics to achieve many of its promises has little to do with the existence of partisan disagreements or of simply "voting for the wrong side." The main reason why these pursuits fail is because politics is primarily about politics, instead of being about people, and the liberties that protect them. …It is a gateway to self-preservation and self-exaltation.

One of the most essential truths of the process of change within us, is that considerable effort over time concentrates the meaning of things. Desiring that all obstacles be removed from our path dissolves the density of life. It dilutes existence.

Intimacy, wisdom, understanding, these aren't built by the immediate dismissal of conflict. They are fashioned by our exploration, by the volley and return we do with one another as we work through all the lines that don't run parallel, and in wrestling with the physical and spiritual mechanisms of an unresolved but constantly resolving existence.

Whether it beguiles or frightens us, so many portions of life, revelation, and relationship, are only accessible when we give ourselves enough stillness and focused thought to wrestle with difficult realities, when we roam the unfilled spaces of our existence so that we might contend with questions that are not easily answered.

By nature, and so much different than most things in our existence, creativity doesn't abhor, but adores a vacuum. Creative thought both revels and reproduces itself in uncluttered and sparsely inhabited realms.